SLIDESo, let’s start with the Frontier.

When I started working on digital scholarship and digital library projects in the early 2000s, this is a pretty accurate representation of what most of us thought the “field” looked like. Uncharted territory. Empty space. Lots of possibility.

The promise of the frontier is that anything is possible. This is the innovator’s dream landscape.

There’s a funny thing about these frontiers, though.

SLIDEIt’s ultimately a trick of perspective.

You see, the frontier depends on a particular view—that of the East looking West. From the other direction, westward expansion takes on a very different tenor. So does the “frontier”

SLIDEBecause, of course, the frontier is never as blank a slate as it might appear on the surface.

SLIDE

We’re currently in a “settlement” mode in the digital terrain, though—pioneering, if you will, how best to use our new communications mechanisms to do the work of the academy: scholarship, curation, and knowledge transmission.

And establishing a settlement, much less turning it into a thriving city, is difficult at best.

That’s because tradition matters.

Traditional business practices reinforce each other at a system level. As we work to establish new practices that fit the contours of our new digital terrain, we are encountering many points of friction and resistance.

We have to strike a balance as we progress—respecting and understanding traditions, and adapting and transforming them for a new time.

Sociologists and historians have studied these types of transitions extensively. And from their work, we can understand a range of things that “frontier moments” offer. We can also predict some of the mile-markers that frontiers-men and women can expect to see along the temporal journey from frontier to settlement.

That is to say, the “frontier” of digital publishing is a microcosm of something sociologists and historians have been studying for more than a century: the formation of new fields. Scholars have sought to understand and document how fields develop from relatively open frontiers into thriving cities with established infrastructure.

In these studies of fields, sociology has asked how does change happen? And what factors are consistently present when we see dramatic alterations to existing practices and the development of entirely new practices?

The topic is one that I’ve long obsessed over—this is what led me to get my PhD in sociology and American Studies. My dissertation work focused on how new genres of music come into being, and how those genres get integrated into the broader music industry, moving in effect from margin to center. So, for example, where did “jazz” come from? Why did the “folk revival” of the 1950s occur? How did country music become a genre?

It’s also what led me to become deeply involved in scholarly publishing and scholarly communications issues by pursuing a career as a librarian. I wanted to be able to directly apply sociological principles to drive positive change in knowledge transmission.

Which is a scholarly way of saying I wanted to revolutionize the way scholarship gets produced, disseminated, and preserved. Or, at least I wanted to help as others did that amazing work.

And librarianship has been, for me (and I suspect for many of you) a fabulous launching point for radical, positive change.

I want to frame my lecture today with a few of these field formation principles that I’ve found helpful for contextualizing what’s happening now in our still-emerging digital library field.

So--across a broad range of industries, there are a few predictable elements in field formation.

Fields of practice—whether you’re looking at banking or medicine, academia or the railroad industry—don’t organize in permanent ways. They are susceptible to and responsive to changes that happen in the broader culture.

SLIDEWhich leads us to principle 1:Sociology tells us that when modes of communication change, new fields and new business practices emerge. This concept echoes early philosophy, including Plato’s Republic, which warned that changes in the modes of music could cause a full-scale social revolution.

SLIDEAs an example—look at how the printing press transformed society and laid the groundwork for significant religious and political change. Just to touch on one small piece of this, look to the Church—by that time, a seemingly permanent, deeply conservative infrastructure—which began to splinter into a multi-dimensional field of practice, where Christianity no longer meant “Catholic”, and priests no longer controlled the market and the message—the people now had access, for the first time, to the Bible and they could interpret it for themselves. Modes of communication matter, and changes within them can open the door to radical societal change.

SLIDEWhich brings us to principle 2: that big businesses are rarely the spaces where innovations happen. We can’t look to the giants of industry or the established leaders to show us new ways forward. Instead, it’s the innovators at the fringes of the field who often have the capacity to redefine the operations of a field.

SLIDETake for example the phonograph. There was a huge market for phonographs in the early 1920s—and most of the manufacturers made both phonographs and phonograph players. Edison, Victor, RCA, Columbia—these were just a few of 150 companies making records or record players at that time.

Enter the radio. By 1922, although its quality was still very poor, it was extremely popular, and sales of records and record players declined rapidly.

By the time the Great Depression hit, the market for records had largely collapsed. But then, around 1930, it began to rebound. Why? The jukebox.

Jukeboxes weren’t created by those that were at the center of the music industry—these were fringe-players called AMI. And they were not taken seriously—at first. But the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult for restaurants, social clubs, and other establishments to afford to bring a live band in. And the jukebox provided a steady stream of music at low cost. Records were usually changed out weekly, creating a steady market for phonographs.

Jukeboxes took off—and they revolutionized the industry in multiple ways, including through making audible, for the first time, music that was banned from the radios—music by African Americans. The jukebox marked white America’s first full exposure to black music—and it opened the door for African American musicians to participate actively in the shaping of musical tastes and expectations. In jukebox-land, rags and boogie-woogie and later blues and early R&B were hits. So the jukebox—which came out of left field, not from the leaders in the industry, changed both the industry and music itself.

So, innovations tend to come from the fringes, not the center. And they often bring new voices into the national conversation as they succeed. Revolutionary.

SLIDEWhich brings us to the third principle. And this runs counter to our notions of the rugged individualism that defined the settlers of the frontier landscape of the US.

Single innovators do not create change—the “lone genius” concept is a fallacy that’s been pretty roundly debunked. Instead, those innovators are key parts of a larger cultural system of production, distribution, and reception

And that system always depends upon

SLIDEnetworks of people

It is those networks of people that work together to legitimize an innovation. It’s these networks of people that move it from the fringes to the center.

I can think of no better set of images to dramatize this than those of the castellers in Catalonia or Barcelona.

(talk about the intensive human chains of interdependence, arms supporting arms, the base having to be in proportion to the structure the group hopes to build) 

SLIDESo—how does all of this sociological knowledge apply to our current circumstances in the field of scholarly communications?

Well, not to state the obvious, but our primary mode of communication has shifted. The Internet provides a faster, freer, more flexible way to share and discuss research findings and ideas. That has dramatic implications for scholarly communications.

And today, we are still operating within a conservative industry using an established business model that evolved over centuries of print culture. We’ve barely modified it. But we’re at least starting to notice it, which is a first step.

There are innovations all around us. I’m going to share a few of my favorites with you today. Most of those innovations have not started at the “center” of our industry, they are taking place elsewhere, on the margins and in the fringes.

And we’ve begun to see networks form that support and advocate for some of those innovations. These networks could transform our industry—but they need to grow stronger and broader. Because

SLIDESystem-wide change requires system-wide involvement.

Or, to say that another way, we cannot make system-level progress by treating institution-level interests.

Right now, our networks don’t include all of the players that need to coordinate in order to move our operations up several levels. We as libraries can’t work in a silo to fix ourselves; we’re part of a bigger system. We have to work directly with the other stakeholders in the cycle. The creators. The publishers. The researchers. And we have to remind the other players—and perhaps ourselves—why we are here and why we matter.

Our mission as libraries is to support and sustain access to our cultural, political, and scientific memory. To disseminate and preserve knowledge as freely as possible because knowledge is a public good.

That’s radical. It’s radical, and it’s wonderful. No one else has that mission. We need to embrace it as we continue to struggle through this critical moment.

SLIDEThis is why Alignment is such a powerful tool. I pivot around to the same question over and over again-- how can we tap into communities to ensure that we—as librarians, researchers, scholars, publishers, and producers—build a strong digital infrastructure that serves our mission well and ensures the broadest possible transmission of knowledge?

SLIDEWhich brings us to the three c’s where we’ll focus for the remainder of this presentation. Chance. Choice. Change. What role is each playing in the shifting landscape of librarianship, and how can we, in this critical moment, use these 3 c’s to transform both our field and our society for the better.

And let me emphasize here that I think librarianship is poised to transform society for the better.

We are radicals—especially in this day and age. And we matter. And we need to remember that we matter so that we do what we need to do to transform our field NOW.

Ambitious, eh? I have good reason to be ambitious. It’s for these guys:

SLIDEThese guys motivate me. I’m laying the groundwork today for the world they’re going to live in tomorrow.

These guys also teach me. Here they are, teaching me about chance.

(PLAY 30 SEC CLIP)

Chance matters. It keeps us interested. I can get my kiddos to play “Rock-Paper-Scissors” almost anytime, anywhere for a simple reason: they never know how it’s going to turn out.

But even the best games of chance can be rigged. My five year old, Gabe, sometimes tries to rig the system, like earlier this week, when he told his little three-year old brother Wes, “oh, I’m going to do paper this time, so you should do scissors so you can beat me!”, and my sweet, willing Wes went along with big brother’s new idea…Rock Paper Scissors Shoot!...only to find that his big brother had (predictably to you and me) chosen “rock” and crushed his little scissors…

I know, right??

How terribly unfair!

Chance is supposed to be the major factor in Rock-Paper-Scissors, the thing that makes it fun!

So, let me relate this example and story back to our scholarly communications landscape.

We’re all watching, waiting with baited breath to see what chance will throw our way next. It’s been an exciting couple of decades, after all—and every time we blink, the game is changing.

Rock! Paper! Computers! Shoot!Rock! Paper! Scanners! Shoot!Rock! Paper! The Internet! Shoot!Rock! Paper! Mobile Devices! Shoot!

Each of these transitions in our communications infrastructure provides us with an open moment in which massive changes can occur. Remember, sociologists have told us that seemingly permanent

structures become highly permeable when the modes of communications change.

We are playing a game. And it’s exciting! And we are not alone.

Others who are “rock-paper-scissoring” or “rock-paper-internet-ing” here alongside us include publishers—both the university press and commercial varieties. And information management groups, including Google and other corporations that seek to provide their customers with access to content.

And interestingly, during these “chance” moments of transition, some of those entities have done things similar to what Gabe did last night to Wes—they’ve rigged the system to their own advantage.

Come play with us! They have said.

And over and over again, we’ve made a choice to do so.

SLIDEWe have to be honest that we have been making that choice, field-wide.

And yes, I know that that choice has felt like this far side moment. There’s your “Big Deal” peddler, eh?

But in all sincerity, I have to pause here and say that I actually don’t think that publishers are devils at all—I think they’re motivated by different things from us. And they’re supposed to be.

Publishers want to package and sell valuable products and services. There’s nothing wrong with that. And they’ve not been dealt an easy hand with all of the communications changes that have come their way in the last two decades. MANY major publishers have folded. Others have merged or been bought out, including with and by non-publisher

corporations. Publishers are seeking survival right now—times of change have unsettled the game for everyone.

So, those that figured out that the academy could be a great market really are brilliant business people. They have provided products and services that we’ve willingly bought and that we continue to buy, regardless of the constraints they impose, regardless of the prices they charge. They are acting out of self-interest, not because they are bad, but because they are seeking survival in an increasingly unpredictable marketplace.

We have become predictable purchasers. No publisher could possibly increase the price of a book by 10% each year and still have a public willing to buy those books. But they could and did find a way to do so in the academic journal marketplace.

We are key players in the current game. And we are a VERY important market.

SLIDESo here is my question: Why do we choose this?

Why are we still choosing to buy products that don’t serve our needs adequately?

Why do we continue to choose to sign and honor nondisclosure agreements that silence us from sharing information about what we are buying?

Why do we pay for access to e-books under the massive constraints that the publishers have set in place?

And above all else, why are we choosing to let a marketplace impinge on our very mission as libraries?? Every time we shift from acquiring

permanent collections to acquiring temporary, rented access to collections, we are ceasing to serve the public good.

Why are we playing by rules that do not serve libraries and do not serve our communities? Why are we playing by rules that do not even serve the publishers in the long term? After all—the heyday is over. The whole academic system is collapsing under the weight of recession. There is no longer money to support the publishers—this well is running dry.

SLIDESociology says that there are many ways out of the conundrum that we’re currently in.

Biology agrees. It tells us that strength isn’t the best predictor of survival. Instead, flexibility is the trait that matters most.

SLIDEAnd with the continual interruptions of the “established business practices” we’re engaged in, if we’re wise and flexible and we use our connections well, we can turn this situation around.

In trying times, we can choose from a range of responses. I’ll name just a few.

1. We can resist change by doing the same thing we’ve been doing in the same way we’ve been doing it.

2. We can embrace change by aiming to be on the leading edge of it. 3. We can move in considered ways, watching the environment and

making incremental changes as they make sense.

But fundamentally, none of those responses is particularly useful if it’s done solely at an individual or institutional level. We need to flexibly move forward as a community, as a network, if we want to create a sustainable scholarly communications landscape.

SLIDESo what are our choices today, in this critical moment for libraries and for all of scholarly publishing—where might we invest differently in order to make the system-wide changes we need.

I have a few suggestions, first of things I think are trends worth watching, and then of things I think EVERY one of us needs to begin working towards, in whatever ways we’re able.

SLIDETrends worth watching in scholarly communications today:

SLIDELibrary PublishingFor more than two decades, faculty, researchers, and students have approached college and university libraries to gain technical support and staffing for early experiments in digital scholarship. From hosting ejournals and ETDs to collaborating with teams of researchers to construct multimedia experiences, these libraries have been willing and able partners in this academic mission of creating and disseminating scholarship.

By 2007, these library-based activities began to formalize, as documented in two key reports: Ithaka S&R’s University Publishing in a Digital Age and ARL’s Research Library Publishing Services: New Options for University Publishing. Subsequent studies reinforced the importance of these emerging library-based publishing endeavors. As

demonstrated by the seminal Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success report, publishing services now are thriving across the whole range of academic libraries today, from small liberal arts colleges to premier research institutions. These are no longer one-off initiatives; they are a range of models that are contributing greatly to our scholarly output.

This growth of library publishing activities provided the impetus and rationale for creating the Library Publishing Coalition to help advance this subfield for U.S. and Canadian academic libraries. Hosted by the Educopia Institute, and driven by 60 academic libraries, the LPC project (2013–2014) is now founding this new organization, which will launch this summer.

Its mission is to promote the development of innovative, sustainable publishing services in academic and research libraries to support scholars as they create, advance, and disseminate knowledge. As a key part of this work, the LPC seeks to document practices and services in the field, and to foster strategic alliances and connections both across and between libraries and other academic publishers.

SLIDEThe project is funded not by grant dollars, but by seed funding from the participating libraries. In June 2012, a proposal authored by Educopia, Purdue University, Virginia Tech, and the University of North Texas was sent out to institutions involved in library publishing in the US and Canada, inviting them to join the project. More than 60 institutions stepped forward, contributing time, energy, and between $2K and $10K for the two year project.

The project is structured around three key deliverables: developing the identity and governance for the nascent organization, publishing the Library Publishing Directory (with 110 entries, the first comprehensive directory of these activities), and hosting an annual forum (the first

included keynotes from Brandeis’s John Unsworth and AAUP’s Peter Berkery, and alignment panels comprised of stakeholders from libraries, presses, service providers, scholars, and related organizations.).

So why does this matter? For several reasons. One, it concretely demonstrates the investment libraries are making in the production and dissemination of scholarship. Last year, the libraries profiled in the Directory published 391 faculty-driven journals, 174 student-driven journals, 937 monographs, at least 8,746 conference papers and proceedings, and nearly 100,000 each of ETDs and technical/research reports. These publications covered an array of disciplines, including law, agriculture, history, education, computer science, and many, many others.

Faculty-driven journals were the most common publication reported by these libraries. Over 70% of the libraries in this Directory published at least one in 2012 and over half (54%) published at least one student-driven journal. Thirty-six percent produced at least one monograph, and more than three-quarters published ETDs. More than half reported publishing data, audio, and video, in addition to text and images.

Library publishing programs range from small, experimental endeavors to large, more mature operations with several dedicated staff members. Libraries reported between .01 and eight full-time equivalent in library staff, and many also reported employing graduate (30%) and undergraduate (26%) students.

Library publishing groups overwhelmingly prefer open access publication (95% focus mostly or completely on open access). And although 90% of libraries rely in part or completely on their library’s operating budget to support publishing services, notably, 10% do not. Among those libraries that are subsidizing these activities, the operating budget is contributing an average of 88% of the publishing budget.

This is a trend to watch. Libraries are beginning to build the infrastructure and skills base to advance scholarly communications as a service to their institutions. That sounds a lot like where University Presses got their start about a century ago.

2. WebArchivingI cannot believe that it’s 2014, and web-archiving is still something that gets so little attention. THIS IS WHERE WE SHOULD BE COLLECTING, FOLKS.

I remember the first time I met Vicky Reich from Stanford University. I got to pick her up from either her hotel or the airport and drive her over to Emory for a talk. She was a badass. She still is a badass. And our conversation in my beat-up graduate student car—whose name was DIVA and who had an ant colony living in her ceiling, but that’s another story—anyway, that conversation from well over a decade ago, still resonates. We talked about how imperative it was for libraries to keep building collections and how scary it was to see so much of library acquisitions coming in rented form, with all of the limitations those rental agreements proscribe.

We wrestled with what content types were likely to be most important to future scholars. And we shared our deep concern that those content bodies simply would not exist.

Folks, we’ve leaned on the Wayback Machine and Brewster’s team’s truly fabulous work WAY too hard in this country. They collect a lot, but with very specific parameters. They capture infrequently, and they cannot capture effectively the hidden web.

As libraries, we’ve paid far too little attention to what we could be capturing NOW that will be the special collections of our futures.

I remember at an ARL-CNI conference in 2009, being exposed to the Human Rights Web Archive project, a phenomenal endeavor undertaken by Columbia University Libraries. I remember 5 years ago thinking “finally, it’s taking off!”. But with the exceptions of a few really bright pioneers in our midst—including Columbia, University of North Texas, Library of Congress, CDL, the GPO, Harvard, Old Dominion, George Washington, and Stanford, web-archiving is not yet happening. That’s disastrous, folks. And it’s not the responsibility of ‘digital librarians’ or ‘archivists’ or ‘acquisitions librarians’—it is our joint responsibility to nail down our collecting areas, and to work with faculty and subject librarians to deeply collect these materials.

And let me highlight the content base that keeps me up at night. It really does. Born-digital news. We’re barely capturing the pdf versions of what gets printed and dropped on peoples’ doorsteps. And that’s a problem. But of more jaw-dropping concern to me is our lack of panic about the bigger news we’re missing—the web-based content that changes multiple times a day and that includes comment streams. As a scholar, I can say with absolute certainty that the libraries that have THAT content in the future will have no shortage of demand for it.

Is it hard to collect? Yes. Is it harder still to preserve? Yes. Is it fraught because of rights issues? Absolutely. But folks, WE CAN DO HARD THINGS. And we are charged with looking out for the public good. This is our responsibility, and we need to get on it.

3. That brings me to preservation.We still are doing a lousy job of it.

There was a great conversation with Vicky Reich, David Rosenthal, Kate Wittenberg, Cliff Lynch, and others about this at a conference I hosted in Barcelona last year: Aligning National Approaches to Digital Preservation II. We talked about the study Oya Reiger and Robert Wolven’s report from 2011 regarding the content not preserved in either LOCKSS or Portico. And we talked about the really big issue that no

one seems to want to study or talk about: that the things that ARE being preserved, that 15-20% of e-journals, are the things in least danger. Again, what has happened to our drive to collect, acquire, stabilize content? That’s a core part of our role in the scholarly communications cycle, and we’ve been passing the buck on this one for a long time. We can’t afford to lose the scholarly record. And it costs little to stabilize it. We know how to do this—LOCKSS, as a transparent, now TRAC-certified solution, has a fifteen-year track record of dependably acquiring and preserving content in our own libraries, under our own control. That’s so essential—our mission as libraries demands that we do this, whether with LOCKSS or with another tool.

We need AFFORDABLE options that embed our collections within the academy, where we know we will be able to get to them if disaster strikes. And disasters will strike—all kinds. Procrastinating is simply not a good idea on this one.

I’d be remiss here, as the host of a distributed digital preservation network called MetaArchive, not to mention the tremendous work that this group does, including preserving ETDs, e-journals, and special collections materials, as well as newspapers, data, digital humanities productions, and myriad other things.

4. New OA Funding ModelsIt’s exciting time to be in OA land! Gone are the days when the only options were to subsidize production somewhere (usually in the library) or to do an author-pays or APC system. Now, we have loads of options and models—

freemium content, where the lower version is available free, but you can get a premium version at a small cost.

The Knowledge Unlatched model, that seeks to “unlatch” non-OA books through libraries paying a title fee based on how many libraries are willing to subscribe to a particular book. As more libraries participate, the price per library goes down.

The SCOAP3 initiative in high-energy physics, where libraries, funding agencies, and research centers are working together to pay publishers to make the key journals that comprise the scientific output of the field OA.

Models where academic libraries partner with scholarly societies and pay into a common pot (based on a sliding scale) to directly support the distribution and archiving of OA scholarly works (see the new paper “A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access Publishing and Archiving for Humanities and Social Sciences” by Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg).

There are even options that build on the KickStarter model that crowdsource support to an author for OA content. Gluejar is an example.

These are good times…now the challenge is getting behind a few models, community-wide, so that we really can bring about a system-wide overhaul that frees up content AND that provides libraries with genuine acquisitions that they can archive and provide long-term access to, not just rent.

5. SHARE and Coherence. I don’t have enough time to go in depth about either of these, so suffice it to say that if you don’t know about them, go do some research. Here’s what’s remarkable about both, though. SHARE is a collaboration of ARL with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU). YAY, alliance building! The White House OSTP provided a way to bring the interests of these three groups together. This is a huge accomplishment by any measure.

Likewise, The Committee on Coherence at Scale for Higher Education is a rather phenomenal set of experts who are working to transform the system, including through supporting 10 iFellows to do independent doctoral research. The concept is to study how best to collaborate in terms of infrastructure and workflow.

SLIDESo, that brings me to some of the things I think we need to work on next:These are all low-hanging challenges, ripe for the picking:

1. Title database for libraries/presses: need non-proprietary catalog for editorial work. Title database, in essence. Right now, major expense and a hindrance to open work. Libraries need it, UPs need it. Let’s build it.

2. Integration of canonical and/or peer-reviewed scholarly work published in libraries and other parts of the academy into the library catalog. Geoffrey Bennington at Emory. Journals produced by the library. Is this really so hard? We’re in the same building—let’s work it out!

3. Documentation to help libraries and others (maker-spaces?) implement low-barrier-to-entry publishing options.

4. WebArchiving and determined collecting/acquisitions around topical areas of interest to a campus, and development of a “keepers registry” to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort

SLIDESo I want to wrap up this presentation by thinking aloud about the critical moment I think we’re experiencing and some possible pathways we might explore as we move forward.

As has been mentioned several times already today, we’re experiencing a redefining of scholarly publishing, perhaps both as a field (or set of sub-fields) and as a medium. The result is a number of opportunities and pain points.

The major opportunity is that we—as an academic community, broadly defined—transform our own scholarly products in order to expand knowledge. One important component of this is the role digital work plays in “public scholarship,” which is a very real opportunity, one that can increase the relevance of the academy itself and that can simultaneously have a positive impact on the world-at-large. Breaking

the link between exclusivity and value is essential if we are to have the impact we should, not just within our academic campuses and disciplinary infrastructures, but also well beyond those artificial boundaries.

But there are pain points, and perhaps the most painful is the knowledge that there are wolves circling. They see the library’s collections budget and they want as big a slice of that as they can manage! Commercial entities are not bad—there is much that is good about the roles they play in the broader society. However, their mission is not aligned well with that of the academy—rather than sharing knowledge, they seek to commodify it. And as we all know, they’re very, very good at it.

Which brings us to the core challenge we face today: how can we—as academic stakeholders across the university—make a compelling case for actively investing in digital publishing within the academy?

I can’t answer that entirely—none of us can. But I can say that we’re making some progress toward that goal, and that there are a few concrete things we need to achieve soon.

First, we need to continue to bring administrators into this conversation. ARL has laid great groundwork there. DPN in the preservation realm has done likewise. So has HathiTrust. These are incredibly positive moves. Nothing significant is likely to happen unless we can compel action at the top of the hierarchy. If lead administrators better understand the business proposition at hand, they will be motivated to take action. Controlling and disseminating scholarship locally makes sense at every level for a university—for marketing and promotion of university identity, for demonstrating the value of academic research to the general populace, and for insuring that knowledge transmission flows from the academy outward rather than flowing from the academy, into commercial hands, which then requires a hefty flow of capital from the academy to regain access to that knowledge!

And second, to accomplish anything of this scale, we have to work together. Coalitions are powerful—we know there is great strength in aligned voices. There are a lot of things that hinder our alignment, though—institutional prestige battles and internal turf wars being two of the most important. Advancing scholarship at this moment requires us to engage together and put momentary discomforts aside so that we can build sustainable models for digital publishing within the academy that will fulfill the knowledge dissemination impulse that fuels us.

Thank you.